An issue that is known to plague data centers is cabling. For example, the term “spaghetti cabling” is used to refer to the unkempt cabling mess that is often found springing out from the back panels of server racks at a data center. Spaghetti cabling may result from inexperience, lack of foresight, or laziness of the ones responsible for setting up the servers, and generally leads to poor cooling from impeded air flow and to maintenance nightmares. Although spaghetti cabling may be prevented, or at least mitigated, by shortening, bundling, and labeling the cables, the use of cables itself may be a limiting factor in the scalability of a server rack.
For example, a cable port to which a cable connects generally has dimensions that conform to a widely-used standard and thus cannot be easily changed. Due to the inflexible dimensions of the cable ports and the limited amount of space on a server rack back panel, a limited number of cable ports can be physically implemented on the server rack back panel. This means that, even though the bandwidth of the server rack can be increased by increasing the number of cable ports, a port density issue may arise in which the amount of increase in the bandwidth would still be constrained by the limited number of cable ports that can be physically implemented.